Cultural democracy and schooling in India: A subaltern perspective

Abstract

It is argued that educational spaces often maintain certain forms of hierarchical cultural patterns to reproduce an unequal civil society. The history and contemporary nature of Indian civil society, ridden with relations of caste and class, often interpellates its agenda of hierarchical order in the cultures of schooling. Children from marginalized communities, particularly from the Adivasi (tribal) cultures, are more vulnerable to these undercurrents, and this often results in their dispirited autonomous participation in schooling. The content and nature of the curriculum and modes of pedagogical interactions are the focal channels of its operationalization. In recent times and earlier, various forms of contestations had emerged against this dominant agenda, particularly from subaltern contexts. These took the form of democratic resistances seeking to establish democratic cultures in classrooms and schools (Apple C James, 2007; Darder et.al, 2009). Creating a sphere of this order would promise to enable children to become transformative human beings and autonomous intellectuals. Viewing the regime of education as both liberatory and oppressive (McLaren, 2009), this paper is an attempt to engage with democratic concerns in the realm of schooling in India within the relations of culture, knowledge and its politics.